This GoPro medley is the beginnings of about a years worth of GoPro clips. They all start out the same way, me or someone else staring right into the thing. I figured, why let a years worth of great impressions and expressions go to waste. If you watch carefully you may see someone you know. You’ll definitely get a brief sense of how I use the GoPro as a second or third camera. You’ll also see that I like to hike and swim in the summers.

Pittsburgh Opera Make-Up Session from StartPoint Media on Vimeo.

Back in October, as part of research with Carnegie Mellon University’s Gigapan Time Machine project, I created this short video time lapse as an add-on to the overall project. The Gigapan Time Machine movie is still in post production with Carnegie Mellon. This short film features the process Pittsburgh Opera’s Wig Designer and Make-up Artist James Geier used to transform soprano opera singer Jasmine Muhammad and apprentice Olivia Dolan into operatic characters.

You can check out the production stills here:

These folks collaborated to make this film possible:

Pittsburgh Opera Gigapan Project

James Geier
Wig & Make-Up Designer
Pittsburgh Opera

Jasmine Muhammad, soprano
Resident Artist
Pittsburgh Opera

Olivia Dolan
High School Apprentice
Pittsburgh Opera

Christopher Rolinson
Director of Photography
Point Park University

Marilyn Egan, Ph.D.
Director of Education
Pittsburgh Opera

Dror Yaron
CREATE Lab
Carnegie Mellon University

Clara Phillips
CREATE Lab
Carnegie Mellon University

Music
Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi
Pittsburgh Opera
Benedum Center
October 6, 9, 12, 14, 2012

Pittsburgh Opera Orchestra
Conducted by
Maestro Antony Walker

Singers in Scene One:
Duke of Mantua ~ Michael Wade Lee
Borsa ~ Juan José de León

To celebrate 9 1/2 years of marriage, Cara and I recently took a trip to New Orleans. This is a series of travel images to commemorate the trip showing off the street scene, the music, people and sights of this unique city.

We ate great food (daily), met great people, saw some sights and went to Bourbon Street at midnight. We learned how they live life and bury their dead.

And as a bonus we had a great view.

Geminds Meteor Shower Dec 2012 from StartPoint Media on Vimeo.

This is a view of the Geminids Meteor Shower in December 2012. This video is a follow-up to the experiment conducted with Starstax software. It is best watched at full screen.

The time lapse captured at least five visible meteors over an eight hour period. The camera was open for 30 seconds at a 30 second interval, about half of the time. There were likely more meteors that did not have the luminance to register on the senor.

Music:

I recently contributed video work to a New York Times project. The story was about a team of researchers at West Virginia University who have developed technology to help prevent subway flooding after a major storm like Hurricane Sandy. The team uses an inflatable three layer balloon to act as a subway tunnel plug to minimize or prevent water from entering the subway system.

You can check out the New York Times story by Henry Fountain and the video here.

Mid-November brings the Leonids Meteor Shower. I photographed the impeding meteors using an intervalometer. It was a great idea and it would have worked except the meteors never really showed up astronomically speaking. So what to do with the collection of frames? I tried out StarStax to create this composite image of Polaris. The software also does progressive saving which creates cumulative star trail images as a time lapse which can be created easily for video applications.

For comparison, you can check out the footage as a regular time lapse here.

I spotted the tile shown above embedded along the Boulevard of the Allies in downtown Pittsburgh. This new sighting sparked a bit of research about the message and origins of the tiles and how it might relate to another project I am working on. The tiles often contain a cryptic message about the Toynbee Idea and Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001. During the research, I came across the documentary film Resurrect Dead. The film seeks to reveal the creator of the Philadelphia Toynbee Tiles. The story was intriguing enough to compel me to revisit the other known Toynbee Tiles in downtown Pittsburgh (see the gallery below). With the exception of the tile above, the others appear at intersections along Smithfield Street. Do you know of any others in Pittsburgh? How about Cleveland? It would help me in my research.

The Oliver Lake Steel Quartet with Meshell Ndegeocello performs at the New Hazlett Theater for the City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert.

Cleveland to Pittsburgh from StartPoint Media on Vimeo.

This was my journey from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, in a 29 second time lapse video.

Joe Pletcher, US Army from StartPoint Media on Vimeo.

This is another Veteran Voices interview with World War II vet Joe Pletcher of Bellefonte, Pa. Joe served in the Battle of the Bulge. This is his story.

Thursday night of the workshop is the opening of the Special Olympic Pennsylvania Games. I wanted to cover this story in a way that reflected where my film and journalism work has been going lately, time lapses. I am interested in exploring the the compression and the manipulation of time through photograph. I used a wide shot to feature the the ball field as it filled and emptied interspersed with key moments from the event.

The final day produced the story with the most fun, honey bees! The Centre County Beekeepers Association were gracious hosts to me at a local bee farm. Their I saw first hand what it takes to keep bees and make honey. It was a sweet gig!

In case you missed it, this is the 2012 transit of the planet Venus in front of the sun as seen from Pulaski, Pa. The last Venus transit happened in 2004, It will not happen again until December 2117. It is likely that no one living now will be alive to witness it again. There is an eight year gap between transits followed by a period of over 100 years between transits.